[SPEAKER_00]: there and welcome to our show.
[SPEAKER_00]: The shit no one tells you about writing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm best selling author Bianca Marie, and I'm joined by CC Lira of Wendy Sherman Associates and Carly Waters of PS Literary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi everyone, today's guest is the internationally bestselling author of Girl in Snow and Notes on an Execution.
[SPEAKER_00]: She is a graduate of New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study.
[SPEAKER_00]: She works as a literary agent.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's my pleasure to welcome Daniel Kukavka.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daniel, welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much for having me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm very excited to be here.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am so excited to have you here because CC told me ages ago how amazing notes on an execution was.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was like, oh my god, I'm a god, you have to read it, you have to read it and I've read it and loved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it only then occurred to me that I think you and I actually met in, in, seventeen at BookExpo America.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, because both of our debuts were chosen as Indies introduced program books for the American Booksellers Association.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh, you were there, that was it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It feels like a million years ago, but I do remember it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's too funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love
[SPEAKER_00]: It was one of the last ones I think actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't have too many after that, but it was just so incredible to be there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a debut chosen as an Indies introduced, which was incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was like, I've met this woman and I love to debut as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: So then it made sense why I love this one so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for our listeners, if you're having a look on our YouTube channel, I'm holding up notes on an execution, I think there's multiple covers, probably at this point because the book has done so well, but it's a beautiful cover.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right, so there is so much I want to discuss with you today, Daniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we begin, I just want to ask about the inspiration for the novel, as well as the vision that you had for what you wanted the novel to be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, you know, the inspiration for the novel, I think, was just the fact of consuming a lot in this genre.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've always been a fan of True Crime, I've always listened to the podcast, so much as documentaries and read all the books.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love True Crime, I also love a mystery.
[SPEAKER_01]: My first book, Grown Snow is much more of a who done it, like at, you know, first page about a dead body on the last page.
[SPEAKER_01]: If I not who did it,
[SPEAKER_01]: And I mean, I like to think it does a little more than that, too.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it had that classic structure.
[SPEAKER_01]: And with notes on an execution, you really wanted to try something different and to interrogate the very genre we're looking at, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So I felt that I wanted to do something new with it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also had always been fascinated with serial killers in a way that I couldn't understand about myself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think in a way that a lot of people don't understand, you know, why are we watching these documentaries over and over and over again?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do they keep coming out?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think there are thirteen
[SPEAKER_01]: documentary, so that tip on the death has been made.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do we love that guy so much?
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know the answer, but I wanted to let these tasks the question.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love how you've said, every domain become interesting when they start hurting women.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is so damn true.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you also said in your authors note, you know, you want to look at what we lose when women die, what the victims would be like as adults, because there's so much focus put on the serial killer themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you also finished with
[SPEAKER_00]: The story of the serial killer is bigger than the bodies he leaves behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: It encompasses an infinite web, an elaborate tangle of predominantly female trauma and endurance.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a question lurking in the dark corners of that weary tale.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wrote this novel because I needed to ask.
[SPEAKER_00]: I needed to look.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am tired of seeing Ted Bendy's face.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the book for the woman who survived.
[SPEAKER_00]: absolutely love it so something that I just want to explore before we look into so much of the intentionality of this novel is I know before I begin writing I have this idea and it's this perfect idea and it's like you can hear angel singing and it's glowing and then you start putting you know pen to paper or you start typing out the words and nothing can ever live up to this idea that you had of it
[SPEAKER_00]: But this novel seems so perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just so wonderful.
[SPEAKER_00]: So do you feel like the end product lived up to the vision that you had for the book when you started at writing it or did that evolve as you went along?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I don't think I had the vision for the book until it was over until I had ran.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the vision sort of came to me as my editor and my agent said, Oh, this is what you've done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was like, oh, I think this is what I've done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then telling me what I've done to understand it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't think that I had any intention of going to make any particular statements or do anything specific.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the inspiration from where the book came from, of course, had its intention, but I did not think of that as I was writing each page.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was just trying to tell a story, I think.
[SPEAKER_01]: And sort of what it means to people and what has been layered over it on top of as a narrative comes from the read rather than the writing, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's why it's very important to have people reading your work because, you know, I know for our listeners, you're going to go, oh, I don't have an agent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have an editor, but in terms of beta readers, in terms of first readers, it's so important because sometimes we're not quite sure what we're trying to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is so wonderful to have somebody read it and go, this is what I took away.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what, you know, really stands out for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and the book actually, I mean, this book went through so many iterations.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you think it succeeds on the page, because for a long time, it really didn't.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I first started writing it, it was told in a completely different format from completely different perspectives.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my agent read it and sort of said, this is not at all, sort of, why I'm not interested in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I am interested in this one aspect, so flip it and make it make it that book instead.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I did, and I think that process really helped me to find what I wanted it to be as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm fascinated by that because I'm so fascinated by the evolution of story.
[SPEAKER_00]: How you begin thinking, this is the main character or this is what the story is and as you write or as you get feedback, you realize that wasn't really it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in terms of that, I want to look at so much of the intentionality you brought to every decision you made about the novel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's clear now to me in terms of the rewrite.
[SPEAKER_00]: how intentional these things were so we're going to go through each of that because I keep saying on the podcast it doesn't matter what you do just do it with intentionality right for our listeners let me read the back copy just so that for those of you on familiar with the book I just want to give you
[SPEAKER_00]: a bit of orientation here.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knows what he's done and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through a kaleidoscope of women, a mother, a sister, a homicide detective, we learn the story of Ansel's life.
[SPEAKER_00]: We meet his mother, lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hazel twin sister to Ansel's wife, forced to watch helplessly as a sister's relationship threatens to devar them all and finally saffy the homicide detective hot on his trail.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fishes that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.
[SPEAKER_00]: Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, notes on an execution presented chilling portrait of womanhood,
[SPEAKER_00]: As it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyche's of violent men.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so the first thing in terms of intentionality is we begin with Ansel when there's just twelve hours to go until he's going to be executed.
[SPEAKER_00]: All the other POVs are written in the third person, but he's written in the second person, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So why that choice?
[SPEAKER_01]: This is a long story, but I'm gonna tell it to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: So when I first started writing this book, I thought it belonged to Ansel, the serial killer.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought this was his novel, and I had no intention of flipping it on its head, whatever.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was trying to investigate my interest in serial killers by going into the monitor serial killer and thinking about it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first draft I turned into my agent was a book told from Ansel's perspective that's banned from his birth to his death.
[SPEAKER_01]: alternating with chapters from a character who's barely ended anymore, named Blue.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Blue had this teenage love triangle going on, and Soul had murdered a sibling with her, so she now no longer has.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it was totally totally different.
[SPEAKER_01]: Half the book was told from Ansel.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first main chapter, which is told from his mother, Lavender, is started with that, but from his perspective as child.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the only thing that stayed from that first draft was the scene set in the prison, which
[SPEAKER_01]: counted down the last hours of his life, and that was only one chapter of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was maybe like ten pages.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my agent read it and very thoughtfully said, that part is interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then she said to me something I'll never forget, which is what about the women?
[SPEAKER_01]: What about the women?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this is a book about that instead.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that just really clicked for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: That plus the notes about the prison being more interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think then stretched out structure of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the whole thing takes place in a twelve hour countdown with the women's stories and dispersed in between.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it actually takes up
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, I think like ten or fifteen percent of the book now.
[SPEAKER_01]: His chapters are very short compared to the women's.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when I first sat down to write them, I kept them in the third person.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the first line is you are a fingerprint.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had started as he is a fingerprint.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I wrote the entirety of the Ansel's sections in the third person.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they felt so flat.
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt something was missing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was watching yet another Ted Bundy documentary and thinking to myself, why am I here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Why are we doing this?
[SPEAKER_01]: And the concept I think is to bring ourselves close to what it feels like to be a person that bad person who makes those horrible decisions a person who is evil in this way.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're so curious about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's morbid.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a scene, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I thought, well, what if the reader is the serial killer then?
[SPEAKER_01]: The serial killer is you, you are a fingerprint.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And it brings you so much closer.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I went back and I literally just transcribed everything from the third person into the second.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it came alive.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was like a lightning bolt.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've never had an experience like that since.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was incredible and I love how you make us the serial killer.
[SPEAKER_00]: But besides that, there was even another side to it that felt like Ansel was telling his story to himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only you could have been Ansel because he's so disconnected, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't know how to feel things properly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't know how to behave.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's always looking at other people for cues on how to do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so at the whole time, it had that double thread.
[SPEAKER_00]: where we are the serial killer and Ansel's just so disconnected from himself that it's almost like he's telling the story to himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely, he's super into salt with apologizing.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has this thing he calls the theory, right, which is the stack of nonsense, rather she's been writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we later find out that it's under nonsense, it's basically incomprehensible.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a puddle of nonsense.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that he thinks is his brand new fresh take on philosophy, but it's basically like, you know, a freshman in college has taken a philosophy one on one class.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it later comes to like the other characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's what he's writing.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he believes that he's smart.
[SPEAKER_01]: He believes that he's so different from all the other madness prison because he is thinking deeply about right and wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's thinking deeply about himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so he's telling the story of himself to himself in a way that lets him off the hook or try to let him off the hook until the moment where it came.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it is because he's trying to more than trying to make sense of his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's trying to excuse the decisions he's made, etc., etc., so there is that mythologizing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love the part where the prison warden goes, oh, it's a manifesto.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I've seen hundreds of these and he gets so upset.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's like, it's not a manifesto because I'm more special than these other people who've written the manifestos.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it totally is.
[SPEAKER_01]: What else would it be for the manifesto, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that just made me giggle because he gets so offended.
[SPEAKER_00]: He really gets upset.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the novel has multiple piervies besides Ansel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have lavender, his mother Hazel, who's his ex-wife sister, and saffy the detective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this brings back to something you said, because you started off as blue as a POV character.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't want to give away in the story who blue is, but there are two other women who you could have told the story from as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shona, who's a prison guard, who he kind of develops a relationship with, and then it was blue.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think when it comes to intentionality in a story, it's as important to go, these are the characters I'm including for these reasons and these are the ones I'm taking out or I'm excluding.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you can speak a bit about why those three women and why leaving out the other ones, especially considering you started with blue.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's an interesting fact that you've been pointed that because I held quite a serious audition as how I'm looking at it now in retrospect.
[SPEAKER_01]: At the time, it just wasn't sure what story one was to tell a new lavender would be one of the characters.
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew Safi, who later becomes a detective, would be one of the characters, but I did not know she would later become a detective.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had started out saying, okay, this is a story about the women and then who are the women.
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew I had lavender, I knew I had saffee, and then from there I went in a ton of other directions.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wrote a chapter from a character named Olympia who is a employee at the dairy queen, where it's all works.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wrote a chapter from the perspective of Cheryl, who is an adoptive mother later on in the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wrote a chapter from a courtroom illustrator who no longer exists.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tried to write some from Shana, it didn't work the voice, it just wasn't right.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when I found Hazel, who I had originally been a younger sister to Jenny, who is Ansel's wife,
[SPEAKER_01]: I sort of thought, okay, these three are the most interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: I thought they were the most interesting.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had sort of planned out the rest of the book to write twelve women.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I gave the first three to a friend who read it and shout out to my friend, Janessa, who read it very early and said, I like these women.
[SPEAKER_01]: Why don't you have some come back?
[SPEAKER_01]: And there was this click where I was like, oh, I know exactly where Lavender is going to be in another thirty years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Safa is going to become a detective.
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Hazel's going to have this
[SPEAKER_01]: really complicated relationship with our sister when they become adults, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I, that was the moment the whole book sort of just unfurled in front of me was when I found those three, but it wasn't for lack of trying everybody else.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and this is what I mean all the time when I say circle the building of your work, you know, Daniel circled this building like a movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of circling happening here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also in terms of, so Jenny is the one who enter married to Ansel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so why not her perspective?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why her sister's perspective?
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I tried her first.
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually wrote many thousands of words from Jenny and she was too enamored with Ansel.
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew someone who could see through them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I knew someone who could see her in much more clearly and who wasn't being fooled by him, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And part of Hazel's perspective is that she's watching her sister get tugged under the waves by this guy and she can sort of, she gets it but she also is scared of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's nothing worse than feeling so helpless.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you see someone you love in the troll of somebody like this and you can see, you know, through them and they can't see it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you just feel so utterly, utterly helpless.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I love that we had it from Hazel's perspective because we got that sense of impending doom that this is not going to end well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet we still had access to Jenny through Ansel's PRV.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had access to Jenny through Hazel's P.A.B.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we still see Jenny, even though we're not in her point of view.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I loved there was a moment where I knew I was on the right track.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I was writing Hazel's point of view, and I was writing the scene of Jenny and Hansel's wedding and they're dancing together in their first dance.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Hansel's so charming, turning charming in from Hazel in the audience.
[SPEAKER_01]: She can see that as he turns in the dance, his smile just falls completely off his face.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then something that Jenny herself would never be able to see his smile was fake.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And here's what can see it for Jenny's dancing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, she's in the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's her wedding day.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can we talk about the structural framework of taking us into the past and bringing us back repeatedly to Ansel as the time takes away until his execution.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this kind of structure like what did it allow you to do in terms of pacing and tension?
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to be very thoughtful about where my clues for the front story were coming into the backstory.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was something that just takes time and error.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that's something that you just have to cry.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it feels like things are really too fast, you have to pull them back.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if it feels like they're moving too slow, you have to push them forward.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I don't think there's any way I could have set it up planned that out before writing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think it had to come just past that was working on the chapter as that's what we're going.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that is something that's organic that you've got to, it's like a tuning fork, you know, you have to feel for the emotional calibration of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have a follow-up question before that, a word from our sponsors.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, correct.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a follow up question to that is the challenge in this kind of framework is to make the present day storyline as compelling as the past, which you couldn't have done entirely through interiority and emotionality alone because to be a person who understands that in two hours time, you will die is a big thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of reckoning that you can imagine will be happening and there's a lot of feeling etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: But without giving anything away I want to say that you included a lot of plot elements as well to heighten the tension and make it especially fraught.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there something that was automatically there?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was there something that came with the rewrite?
[SPEAKER_00]: Speak to us about their process.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was always there because I knew that you cannot count down from twelve hours for someone who knows he's going to die.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has to believe he's not going to for at least half of those.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was where the plot points really came in.
[SPEAKER_01]: He has this prison garden, Shawna, who he's sort of manipulated into believing that she can
[SPEAKER_01]: break him out of prison that he's not going to die so he he opens the book he knows the countdown is happening but he's like I'm better than that I'm special right and there comes a point at the very very middle of the book right and that crux where you're like what's going to happen now that is just sort of a structural boom in the way that you know you look at structure of any novel and you can say
[SPEAKER_01]: three actors, so five actors.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think this one might be a five-back, a fine one's told me it was a five-back, but I'm not sure that was after, it was after.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you can see within the structure of the book that he has a moment of changing and a moment of recognition and realization that I think was extremely necessary and heightened attention.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think if that wasn't there, it would fall very flat.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but they're ticking clock.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just makes it feel that much more fraught.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's so interesting because there's a part that goes, this is a terrible person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's done terrible things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know that he's going to die, but there's a part that almost doesn't want him to die, like you just wrote it so brilliantly because I was just so constantly conflicted.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I like that my attention wasn't on him.
[SPEAKER_00]: My attention was on the victims the whole time because you keep showing Safi thinking of the victims as they would be later in life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for many of them, what she imagines for them is so mundane.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that she imagines that they go on to become Pulitzer Prize winning chemists or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just, you know, being moms, just painting their nails or cooking dinner, which was incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: That specificity really made them come alive.
[SPEAKER_00]: So can you speak about writing them that way?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that was a much later addition to the book actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was really a question of how can you write a book about a serial killer?
[SPEAKER_01]: How can you write about murder without really thinking about the victims themselves?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I hadn't done much thinking about them for a long time.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were sort of these symbols of what he had done rather than people.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the people who popular the story are the women in his life, not the victims.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I did want to make the distinction because I think many books focus on the victims.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I was interested in the living women around him.
[SPEAKER_01]: but you have to pay tribute to the people who have sort of died in her serial killer's hands, I think, and that was my intention there was really to let them have a moment to sing.
[SPEAKER_01]: They didn't have the whole book, they didn't really have perspective chapters, but they didn't have a moment where they got to say their piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and the fact is that they didn't have to become purely surprised when in chemists for their lives to have been worthy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, anything they chose to do with their lives meant they had their choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't taken away from them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there is a poignancy that really touches the Jews throughout.
[SPEAKER_01]: I remember the moment one of those scenes came to me was.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had gone, it was a Sunday, I don't usually write on Sundays, but I had gone to brunch for a friend's birthday and came home and just had this image in my head and I sat down to write it just immediately because I had pictured one of the victims is he has this image of herself on her grandpa's cell boat in Tampa, she's peeling it orange and she's smelling it and I was able to give her life in that moment in a way that she does not get to live the rest of her life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: So other things in terms of intentionality, you chose not to use traditional quotation marks in Ansel's POV, but you use them in the women's.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, that's why they're choice.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to give him a really distinct sense of style.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I felt that, you know, maybe it was literally ego.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it's kind of cool tonight.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's quotation marks, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: It was time to find out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I felt like I had a lot of fun within on the sentence level.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was just a stylistic choice that I liked.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it's funny.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm working on a new book now and
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't have a desire in the new book.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just doing it with regular quotation marks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think so much of his perspective is so much in theory or it's so much thinking because he's just sitting there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he doesn't have agency generally.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is just thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I liked that there was this crossover between his thoughts and what people had actually said because he was even remembering them.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was a great stylistic choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought in his POV.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I also loved is that you had each of the peer v characters grappling with existential themes like meaning and choice and what it means to be a good person, not just answer because he's the one who's using self as an intellectual and the other woman don't and yet they're all grappling with these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's like the golden thread through all the peer v's.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I think the women are essentially
[SPEAKER_01]: more human than Anselas.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was intentional.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they have families.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have love.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have empathy.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have questions.
[SPEAKER_01]: They have self-awareness in a way that Ansel really doesn't about himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's all ego.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's all sort of like faux faux philosophy, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And he's selfish.
[SPEAKER_01]: She's egocentric.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the women are able to see beyond themselves and actually ask the questions that he only is raising the surface of.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but and also like guilt, if you look at the themes of guilt, look at Lavender's guilt, they so much guilt woven through her story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's not the person who's been murdering people, but he has zero guilt about any of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_01]: And how winning blame themselves for the actions of men comes through in every perspective.
[SPEAKER_00]: So many of the chapters are written almost as short vignettes that are strong together as opposed to really letting the readers sink into a scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not allowed to be too comfortable in each scene and we jump around quite a bit.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that allow you as the writer to achieve while also giving the readers snapshots of what they need, but not letting them become too complacent?
[SPEAKER_01]: tension, I think it's all about tension.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I felt myself getting bored in one space, that's when you have to move, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually have to move before you get bored in one space.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every, I think every chapter needs to feel like the reader is getting a little bite of something amazing, but not the whole thing so they need to be going, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think any form of writing should implement that in some way, some form of tension, some form of stakes and some form of freshness and surprise.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why it jumps around so often because when I felt that I was getting stale somewhere, I was like, nope, let's fresh in this up, let's go somewhere else.
[SPEAKER_00]: amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so there were also instances which I loved where you led the reader very particularly to them reaching certain conclusions about what they thought was happening in that moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they feel like they've read between the lines and they think they know what happened and then later you ripped that out from under them and all their assumptions are upended.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, can you speak a bit about doing that in a way that the reader doesn't feel manipulated or they don't feel like, oh man, I'm being strung along here because there were few instances like there's an instance with lavender as she's in the ocean.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, okay, I think I know what's happening here.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, I think I really know and then later I'm like, nope, didn't know what was happening here.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's funny you mentioned that specific woman because I also didn't know it was actually happening there or not I left it rather open ended as she's walking into the ocean what's gonna happen to her right and when this book was just one chapter of lavender I was happy to let the reader make whatever conclusion they wanted but when I realized that actually she was going to be a returning character I did have to answer that question so actually I think most of those moments came from me not knowing at the beginning and then actually answering them
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that because I'm a huge pancer and I believe if I'm surprised my read is going to be surprised and they are instances where the read really thinks they know what's happening and I love it when I think I know what's happening and it turns out I don't because I'll try and fill in the blanks and then I'll be like ah you kept me on my toes I like that right so I just want to read two examples of Daniel's writing it's just exquisite on the line level it's perfect
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what we come to literary fiction for because it just makes us think about the human condition.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Saffy knew how to solve a mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: She knew that itch, the restless tingling at the tips of her fingers, the hunt and the capture, the rush and release.
[SPEAKER_00]: She knew how to twist and pray each more solemn information, tugging tiny threads until the whole thing dissolved.
[SPEAKER_00]: A mystery.
[SPEAKER_00]: Saffy could unravel the in study and exact an unequivocal science.
[SPEAKER_00]: But some cases evolved beyond mystery into something more crooked, more complex.
[SPEAKER_00]: The worst kind of mystery transcended its own body, transformed into a brand new sort of monster.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some cases turned cannibal, devouring themselves until there was nothing left but grizzled.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just stunning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's another paragraph.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every brain was different in its deviance.
[SPEAKER_00]: Human hurt manifested in select mysterious ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a matter of finding the trigger point.
[SPEAKER_00]: The place where pain had landed and fested.
[SPEAKER_00]: The soft spot in every hard person that pushed them to violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: Surfing knew it was a matter of learning those intricacies.
[SPEAKER_00]: of trying to understand and act that felt inturably intimate and bearably human, sometimes like a twisted form of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to assume, Daniel, that you studied philosophy at some point in your life.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I have not.
[SPEAKER_01]: I actually had to Google, like, a last few, one-on-one for some of animals' chapters, especially like, you know, thinking about who he would be quoting and who he would be thinking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but you're a deep thinker, and you can see that in this.
[SPEAKER_00]: There were so many times that I stopped and I was highlighting, and I was like, oh my God, I never thought of it that way before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I mean, I feel like that's part of our job as writers is to let the readers see our worlds in ways that they might not ever have perceived it themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I don't really know where that comes from in me either.
[SPEAKER_01]: I really don't.
[SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't as always add down to ask that question or to write that paragraph even.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just kind of
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, I think that's the thing about a creative aspect, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is it plumes the depths in some ways, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I think they're, I don't know, we do this because we want to be able to reach that state, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: That heightened state where we're asking the deeper questions about it means to be a person.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's why we write, and that's why we read.
[SPEAKER_01]: And often when I'm writing, I have no idea how I got there or how I reached that moment or how I reached that language, it just exists.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know, it's like magic, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's when the angels are singing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so last question because I know our readers are going to want to know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So as an agent, I mean, it's fascinating that you such a brilliant author, Andrew and Agent.
[SPEAKER_00]: So as an agent, are you very editorial, do you struggle not to, you know, put too much of your voice into your client's work?
[SPEAKER_00]: How does that work for you?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I'm extremely editorial.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it is, I mean, I love it, but that's why I do it because if you like, I have the skillset to see what a book can be.
[SPEAKER_01]: before it is actually that book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And partner with that person to help them make it that version of the book before we send it out.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that is so much of my job.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the part where we love the most actually is seeing something, seeing is potential working with the author to make it the best it can be.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the both of us bringing it out into the world and saying, what do you guys think?
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the answer is that everyone else loves it too, it's most satisfying thing in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love that you've said both of us because I know with my recent book, my agency was like, every time we hit a milestone or we hit bestseller list, she would be like, congratulations to you and I'd be like, no, congratulations to us because it really is a team effort.
[SPEAKER_00]: It truly, truly is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are you open to queries at all or not open to queries?
[SPEAKER_00]: I know our listeners would like to know that as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I am open to queries now, and then I'm actively looking for new clients at the moment actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: I had a great couple of years agenting and I've I've sold a lot of my books, so I'm really looking for new clients.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find me on the trialist website, trialist literary management.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have a whole mixture of wishlist on there, and then I have things that I'm specifically not looking for and the query form is to the website as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: But we will say here, I look always for
[SPEAKER_01]: I like to say literary fiction that is wearing some kind of genre sunglasses, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: So, in a similar vein to know it's on an execution and love literary fiction that works and plays with crime, thriller suspense mystery, I love literary fiction that bears into speculative, really light speculative, or horror elements, and I love straight literary fiction too.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, brown people in the real world, but it has to be doing something different with form and with structure and with voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'll put this out into the universe in particular and look looking for
[SPEAKER_01]: new kinds of mysteries and thrillers, specifically from writers on the margins who are telling a different kind of story within the same genre balance that I love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, Daniel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So for our listeners, we are linking to notes on an execution on our bookshop.org affiliate page.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you get the book there, you support an independent bookstore and the podcast at the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't wait to have you back with whatever's next.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for having me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's it for today's episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope you'll join us for next week's show.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the meantime, keep at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, it just takes one yes.